moving to a new place entails a lot of hard work, it requires not only mental and emotional preparation but tough manual labor as well – packing things into bags or boxes, discarding accumulated junk, cleaning up the old room, saying goodbye to people you will leave behind, saying hi and adjusting to the new people you will be living with, cleaning up the new room, physically carrying the stuff to the new place, unpacking them all again, and setting them up in the new corners you would want to put them in – just listing these steps is already exhausting. in fact, survey says that moving house is of the top 5 most stressful things in life, the others are work, debt, loneliness, relationship problems, and whatever else.

so why do people move in the first place? there could be a lot of different reasons – forced eviction, going to somewhere better, or it’s just the natural progression of things. not that i’ve stopped growing, but i have always remembered my growing up years to be punctuated by endless moving to different houses temporary called home. usually the scenes would be as dramatic as “running on empty” but mostly its just a chore brought about by the school or work we chose. my clothes were always in boxes or suitcases, i never bothered to take them out to put inside drawers and closets, i would never buy things mindlessly, i would always think about disposing the old one first before getting something new. or else they would be a pain to pack or carry when i move again. and so i lived my life without baggage, light, cool and easy.

last year though, i decided to spin in place, i’ve changed too much and assimilated a lot of bad things into my life, falsely believing that everything i was before should be discarded in order to stay here. i accumulated a lot of useless baggage, and now i feel heavy and burdened, but then an epiphany came and whispered a nugget of wisdom into my ears – you don’t need to be as heavy as a rock, swim in the mud or sink deep into the soil to grow roots, i could be an aerial plant instead.

today my room looks like an aftermath of a holocaust, things scattered here and there, i have to sort through everything to find out what to keep and what to throw away. these junk would have stayed hidden in bags, rotting or collecting dust, had i not decided to move to a new place and stir the skeletons in my closet. it will take a while for this place to become habitable again or have some semblance of order, but small steps get you there.

coming, going, leaving, entering, moving, staying in place, uprooting, growing roots, everything is part of what makes life interesting. this might be one small step for a wandrer like me, but it’s a giant leap for all nomads out there =)